Journey to the Virtual World

Indonesian Cloud sharing at vForum

Glad to know that Indonesian Cloud is sharing how they use VMware technology in vForum Indonesia. Every Enterprise IT wants to be a Private Cloud provider, and becomes a business service provider instead of technology system builder. To me, Indonesian Cloud is a good success story of how you take advantage of VMware technology and partnership.

Neil Creswell, their CEO, is doing the keynote. Yes, that link is his Twitter handle. As you can see, he is engaging customers on social media. To me, if you are an IT leader you need to be engaging in social media. Hiding behind the comfort of office wall is not what your customers want. This is part of the Digital Business imperative. This is even more so if cloud is a key component of your business. Social media provides transparency that customers and partners value.

Can you spot something assuring from the above price list? Something that is the hallmark of transparency.

Yes. No Bill Shock.

I heard it from customers again and again. They got a bill shock from their cloud provider. How often do you get a bill shock? Business is doing poor, yet your cloud cost increases? A common story is you get hit by a bug or problem, which generates excessive logs or consumes a lot of network. You get a high bill for that!

In the cloud, cost has to be simple. Ideally, it should be like your utility bill. Today’s cloud pricing is complex, with a lot of add-on. Indonesian Cloud’s pricing is simple and predictable, something we can learn from.

One factor that drives simplicity is the technology stack. Indonesian Cloud runs almost all the VMware stack. On the hardware powering the ESXi, they run a hyper-converged from SuperMicro, as shared by VMware top blogger Duncan Epping in his blog. That 2RU, 4 Node form factor provides high density setup. On top of that, they use VMware VSAN.

A customer once told me, “To build is one thing, to operate is another”. Operations, what happens after you live, is certainly essential. Indonesian Cloud has a Performance SLA concept. They know when any customer’s VM is experiencing degradation, often before the customer itself notice that. They are using the vRealize Operations contention counter to track it. They are also using vRealize Log Insight to analyse the log files. The team uses Log Insight to analyse not just vSphere, not just VMware, but also non VMware products.

I had the joy of working with their team in creating some creative dashboards to help them monitor their environment. They’ve allowed me to share one of the dashboard here.

I worked closely with Indonesian Cloud since March 2015. I still keep the email from Neil, which started the journey of partnership. I knew Neil for many years, so it was an easy decision for me to partner with his awesome team. He was right, his team was both dedicated and sharp. We came up with several innovative dashboards in both vRealize Operations and Log Insight. A lot of days were spent discussing how to best monitor a VMware-powered SDDC, and I’m glad that the result speak for itself.

There is a lot that other VMware customers and Cloud Providers can learn from Indonesian Cloud. Being a Cloud Provider, be it private or public, is complex but doable. So it’s good to know that Neil is sharing it with fellow customers/partners. If I were a CIO, I’d ask for a site visit to get the insight. The NOC is a good place as you can see it live.